


The most important thing is learning how to fall

by SwordsAndSoftWords



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Idiots in Love, Idiots in general and in love more specifically, M/M, Mentions of past abuse, but nothing graphic i promise, plot is for losers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29311527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwordsAndSoftWords/pseuds/SwordsAndSoftWords
Summary: That’s not really the way of love, to change a person to fit someone else, Aiden says. Lambert simply rolls his eyes at him and continues on his way.That's it, that's the story: Lambert is an idiot and Aiden is vaguely exasperated but also very much an idiot.
Relationships: Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 46





	The most important thing is learning how to fall

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, but this was a hard one. I mean, it wrote very easily but by the end of it I had no idea what had happened. This was my style many moons ago; over-romanced flowery prose that made me a bit sick and came across as pretentious so all my apologies for it. I hope it's readable, because as usual I changed verb tenses about 3 times while writing; it took 6 read-throughs to edit so I hope I got them all.  
> Also, I should say that this began with a half-formed idea of writing a selkie AU but my brain went nope and this came out instead, so temporary title of this in my writing folder was "Is it still a selkie AU if they're idiots and refuse to do it".  
> As per usual, English isn't my first language so if you spot any typos, let me know!

They keep meeting on the Path. After that first terrible job, it’s like they’re scraps of metal being attracted to some sort of magnetic north. Lambert hates it, hates spotting a head of dark curly hair here, a dazzling too-sharp smile there, an occasional glint of green-gold eyes in a crowd. He hates it so much that when Aiden finally kisses him, at a crossroads somewhere in the south, whispering soft words of goodbye, he just lets him get away with it. He hates it so much that when they meet each other again, now with autumn well on its way, he kisses Aiden back in the backroom of a tavern. He hates it so much that when he has to leave the very next day to start making his way to Kaer Morhen for the winter, he feels like something has been left behind.

They’ve known each other for years now. Lambert is still a prick, he says with pride, and Aiden is still a very practical witcher, he claims whenever Lambert accuses him of taking on human contracts. That’s not really the way of love, to change a person to fit someone else, Aiden says. Lambert simply rolls his eyes at him and continues on his way. They clash, sometimes, when they’re both being stubborn about something they think is important. They go their separate ways when they can’t come to common ground in their arguments, and they meet again some weeks later with apologies on their lips and wandering hands that check the other for any new scars.

They haven’t spent a winter together since the one time Lambert was too hurt to make it to the mountain pass on time before the great snows. That winter had been fraught, two witchers traveling the wilderness, towns too suspicious of what they were doing out in the world in a time that didn’t belong to them. That year they’d spent the whole of spring and most of summer apart; Aiden had kept them alive by taking on contracts Lambert wouldn’t and that had made them too brittle around each other. When they met again, they’d agreed to no longer spend winter together; Aiden would join the caravan, as he always did, and Lambert would go to the mountains, as he was always bound to.

They know each other very well. Aiden knows Lambert doesn’t like it when he pushes for them to spend more time together; an extra day he will accept, an extra week will have him throwing Aiden’s emotions back at him like they’re a dirty thing. Lambert knows Aiden can speak a mile a minute or go whole days without saying a word; he knows the haunted looks that precede those days and he very carefully guides them away from any towns where harsher words might be heard.

They have a dance, a routine they have learnt around each other that allows them to be together. Aiden will always sleep in but he’s a light sleeper and wakes up at the smallest noise during the night; Lambert is always awake before dawn, no matter how late he goes to sleep, and will go through and refill both their potions while Aiden is still asleep. Aiden will get fresh water while Lambert will get them breakfast. Aiden will take care of their horses and Lambert goes through their armours and swords. Aiden will kiss Lambert first, Lambert will hold on for longer. Aiden will charm his way into anywhere, really, getting them rooms and food and drinks; Lambert will get them some extra income playing Gwent. Aiden will wash Lambert’s hair and Lambert will rub soothing ointment on Aiden’s bad shoulder. So they go through life, in a violent haze of fighting monsters and monsters they can’t kill.

It’s their twelfth year on the path together – Lambert has been keeping meticulous track while Aiden simply claims it’s been an entire lifetime – when Lambert finally gets restless. He comes down from the mountain with his brother’s words about a soft bard echoing in his head. A human walking the Path is a dangerous thing for all involved and, from the way his brother talked about it, there’s the added danger of feelings that must go unreciprocated. His and Aiden’s is a complicated agreement but it’s purely out of mutual benefit, Lambert knows; traveling together allows them to take on bigger contracts that pay better and would otherwise go unfulfilled or would get a single witcher killed, allows them sex whenever they want it, means they have someone who’ll help patch up the other when things don’t go as planned. There’s no feelings involved, he knows, because otherwise Aiden would have said something about it, like he says something about literally everything. So Lambert knows where he stands but something inside gnaws at him, something that makes his brain pace like a caged kikimora.

He meets Aiden where they always meet, in the same town they first met so many years ago, and they go through their ritual of checking the other for any new scars they might have acquired since they last saw each other. It’s comforting, Lambert thinks, and unrelated to any possible feelings between them. Aiden is well, with the exception of being much thinner than he remembers him. Considering Aiden is already lighter than Lambert, and that Lambert himself is light for a witcher, he gets concerned and can’t rest until he watches Aiden go through enough food for three adult humans. He feels much better after that, and his brain stops pacing for the moment.

He notices other little differences of no importance. Aiden’s hair has grown longer, soft curls tangled and reaching almost his shoulders; he looks paler, which won’t last, the smallest amount of spring sun being enough to bring back the warm honey colour of his soft skin and the freckles that turn his face into a maze he sometimes finds himself tracing in the early light of dawn; his clothes look clean but the armour is chafed in some places and they’ll need to make some decent money to replace it before it stops serving its purpose.

Aiden, in turn, notices all the small changes in Lambert as well. Lambert forwent shaving since leaving Kaer Morhen and his usual scruff is more like an actual beard, and Aiden can’t decide whether or not he likes the feel of it; his hair is softer, less greased back, and that will change as the days gets warmer and steady access to baths becomes scarcer; there’s a nice, healthy amount of fat over his muscles, from a winter spent in safety and warmth; there’s something about the way Lambert won’t quite meet his eye for more than a few seconds before focusing on something else that Aiden won’t prod at yet, won’t pick at until they’re out of town and prying ears.

Aiden knows when not to push. It’s a valuable lesson he learned early on in their relationship, Lambert being prickly and particularly tone-deaf when it came to acknowledging his own feelings. They’d had a particularly violent falling out when Aiden tried to explain that the mutations they’d been subjected to didn’t really do anything to dull feelings, rather made them more acute – the brutal training was what made them carefully compartmentalise what they felt and years out on the Path made them desensitised to things most humans would balk at. Lambert, for some reason, had been brutally averse to the idea that he felt all those emotions at all. They’d gone their separates ways that time by virtue of Lambert simply packing up and being gone before morning. Aiden had thought it ridiculous but decided not to bring that up again until Lambert was ready. Twelve years into being together and he still hadn’t brought it up again.

Aiden knows better than most what out of control emotions feel like. He’d been volatile as a child even before he was surrendered to the Cats to be made a witcher. Bouts of extreme vigorous activity had been interspersed with fits of mutely watching other children play. As he grew, he became more careless when feeling restless; climbing cliff sides, stealing from the neighbourhood farms, jumping from the highest available spot into soft hay. He’d had his fair share of broken bones before he even became someone whose bones were bound to break for a living. After the mutations, the wild swings got worse, his emotions overlapping each other constantly to the point of madness. His instructors would punish him for using signs during sword training, or for getting into trouble with the fully-fledged witchers that would come by the school sometimes. He would spend entire nights out in the snow, or entire days out in the sweltering sun, going through well-learned motions of pretend-fighting. Guxart would constantly remind him that a witcher that wasn’t in full control of himself was a dead witcher and that repetition was the key to achieve the kind of mental state that would allow him to keep his emotions in check.

During his first year out on the Path, he went back home after he heard the rumours about the school’s demise. He found the dead bodies of his former friends and instructors surrounding the old citadel, and felt for the first time what it was like to be devoid of emotion. He swore never to feel it again, and went back out on the Path, leaving the routine and repetition he’d carried for so long in the graveyard that had become his former home.

It took a while for the caravan to form after that, the meeting of brothers who thought each other dead on dusty roads creating the need to reorganise, to create a new safe place for them. The world was particularly cruel to Cats, Aiden had been told countless times, because they did what needed done and they knew the real monsters were more widespread than other witchers were willing to look. So they banded together, the witchers excluded from their own brotherhood, and the caravan grew. They didn’t settle, roaming around the continent carrying their home everywhere they went. Aiden enjoyed traveling with them, enjoyed having someone to talk to other than himself and the trees. When he met Lambert he thought maybe there was a second home to be had there and returned to the caravan only for the long, dark winters when his wolf returned to his pack. There was no more comfort for him in the midst of his own brothers now though, who wouldn’t cook him breakfast in the mornings and who would just as quickly leave him behind if he didn’t wake up in time for the caravan to start moving.

Lambert finds no comfort in going back to his old, crumbling ruin of a home either, he claims. A place that had turned him into a monster and broken him, a place with nothing but ghosts in it. He went because he didn’t know not to go, so he could reunite with his brothers and Vesemir. After Aiden, going back became more painful. Now, he spends the winters facing the ghosts of his past and the ghost of his future, unknowing whether or not he’d be reunited with Aiden ever again. He’s restless the whole time, going through carefully constructed motions that allow him to train, drink, play Gwent and hunt. If Vesemir pushes, he fights back more viciously than ever. If one of his brothers gets the best of him in practice, he lashes out violently. Home was a word Lambert associated only with pain; he’d rather be out in the world, facing the scorn of the humans, side by side with Aiden.

Aiden, who made him feel safe. Aiden, who made him feel calm. Aiden, who made him feel. It was odd to think he’d made a friend out on the Path, but so he had, apparently. It was confusing to think about it. Before becoming a witcher, Lambert remembers little but pain. The pain of his father’s anger in drunkenness, the pain of being taken away from his mother, the pain of knowing he would never see his siblings again. The pain of training when he was the smallest and most fragile of all the boys at Kaer Morhen, the pain of going through the trials, the pain of the mutations. The pain of sneering faces, from his father blaming him for everything to his instructors telling him he was too runty to ever survive to the humans spitting words of hate at the mutant. Spite he was familiar with; he survived because he wanted to throw it back at everyone who hated him before. But the sudden and overwhelming feeling of belonging, and belonging with someone, was utterly unknown to him.

So, when they meet in the spring following the winter of Geralt’s many stories about the bard, Lambert feels panic rising in his throat at every turn and Aiden feels home slipping through his fingers. They leave the town after only a couple of days of rest. Aiden carefully waits for Lambert to say what’s bothering him; Lambert carefully avoids acknowledging his own turmoil. As they lay together that night, alone in the woods and nothing but stars witnessing them, Aiden finally gives in.

“Did something happen during the winter, Lam? You’re being more sullen that usual.”

Lambert shrugs, his shoulder grazing Aiden’s in the motion.

“Alright, different approach then: I know for a fact something happened during winter, I just can’t know what it was because my gift of prophecy is currently revoked. And I know you want to talk about it because you usually save all the important conversations to the middle of the night when no one is around. Might as well let it out now because I’ll only continue to pester you until you finally talk to me, and we both know that’s far more annoying for you than it is for me. So, spill it.”

Aiden turns on his side, one arm under his head to get a clear view of Lambert’s face. Lambert puts both his arms over his face, hiding out, because he thinks he’s also allowed a moment of cowardry sometimes.

“It’s nothing, leave it.”

“I won’t, you know that.”

Lambert heaves a sigh at that, slow and deep.

“Geralt is traveling with someone now. A human.”

There’s a long pause, Aiden waiting for Lambert to continue and Lambert expecting that to clarify everything. Aiden finally takes pity on him.

“Yes, I figured. That ‘Toss a Coin’ song was everywhere during the winter, I swear I almost killed a couple of humans for free. Not many Wolves out there, and I figured Vesemir would know better than to fuck a bard.”

“That’s disgusting, Aiden, please never use Vesemir and that word again in the same sentence.”

“What, bard? No problem, I’m sure it’s not bards he’s fucking anyways.”

Aiden sees it coming, the way Lambert throws himself at him, but he lets Lambert shove him over and straddle him in a fake fight, mostly because he can’t stop laughing at Lambert’s face.

“Alright, alright, I’ll never speak of it again, I promise. If, of course, you tell me what’s your problem with your brother’s bard.”

“It’s not a problem. I just think it’s stupid, to travel with someone when you’re a witcher”, Lambert finally relents, abandoning his position on top of Aiden and settling back down under the blanket.

“Lam, we’re both witchers and we travel together, you know that? And you know Cats have the caravan, which is about as much traveling together as it’s possible to do, I guess.”

Lambert’s brow twitches as he opens his mouth and closes it again, repeating the motion before finally speaking.

“It’s not the same though. The bard is human, it’s dangerous. What’s the point of getting attached to someone who’s going to die as soon as a drowner looks at them wrong?”

Aiden stays quiet, trying to think of a way of saying what he wanted to say without scaring Lambert away. Lambert, for his turn, looks determinedly up, as if the same stars they saw every night were suddenly too interesting to look away from.

“Well, I guess love doesn’t look at the world like that. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense, and I don’t think it even has a point. You love who you love, and you fight for it even if you already know you’re going to lose.”

Lambert doesn’t move but something about that is clearly the wrong thing to say, Aiden could tell. Lambert’s arms are crossed over his chest now and his brow is definitely furrowed in anger.

“Yeah, fuck that nonsense”, is the only response Aiden gets, before Lambert turns his back on him and pretends to go to sleep.

The next morning, Lambert is gone, and Aiden sighs.

It takes Lambert four days before he stops seething, which is the only reason why it takes him five days before he realises that, instead of following his own Path like he usually did when they separated, Aiden had simply followed him. Always slightly behind him and out of sight, but he was making no attempt at hiding the fact that he was very much following Lambert. So he stops moving and waits for Aiden to catch up with him. It’s close to midday when Aiden finally reaches him, coming through unhurriedly as if they hadn’t been apart at all.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than follow me around?”

“Not really”, Aiden answers, calmly, while getting his things off his horse and getting ready to make camp.

Something in Lambert wants to revolt but he knows it’s no use. Aiden, the only person who has ever cared, wouldn’t allow him. He never followed when Lambert didn’t need it. If he’s here, if he had stayed, then that’s how they must go through this.

“It’s not love. We don’t _love_ ”, Lambert says after watching Aiden set up a tent and start the fire.

“Don’t we?”

Aiden is looking at him with an amused look which he can’t decipher, eyebrow raised in challenge.

“No. We’re mutants. We don’t feel that kind of shit.”

The amused look on Aiden’s face vanishes, like a cloud taking over the sun. Lambert feels the drop in temperature acutely and has the sudden need to burrow under a pile of blankets and never leave. A long-forgotten childhood memory arises at that, a small Lambert in his mind hiding under all the blankets he could get his tiny hands on, and his mother laughing with him as they tried to build a make-shift tent in their home. His siblings had been out, playing outside, but he was too sick to go with them. His father had been gone, probably to a tavern. A flicker of a nearly-forgotten emotion came through the memory, and Lambert can almost swear it was happiness.

Happiness, like the time he and Aiden had broken into an alderman’s house and let loose all his goats for being a prick. Like the time he and Eskel had gotten so drunk they had gone into the frozen lake and thrown bombs at it, like idiots, and ended up soaked to the bones getting yelled at by Vesemir. Like the time he got a job done quickly, had been properly paid for it and thanked on top, and had sat, belly-full and content, at the edge of a cliff listening to the gulls and the ocean, the sun setting atop it like a bonfire in the distance. Happiness, like the kind he sometimes got just from looking at Aiden. Aiden, like happiness. He closes his eyes against the memories and feels Aiden’s soft steps approaching and, after half a heartbeat of hesitance, a hand land softly on his neck.

There are memories that do more bad than good, Aiden knows this better than most. He’s prone to getting stuck in his own head, to navigate through those thoughts and come out the other side like a drowning man finally breaching the water. It was rare for Lambert to do it, though, always much more willing to keep moving forward like the devil himself lived in his memory. So the sudden disconnect worries him, but also gives him hope. Maybe now was the time for them to talk about this. So he holds on, carefully, onto Lambert and waits. Waits for Lambert to come out the other side of it, and refuses to move until he opens his eyes, pure-gold reflecting the midday sun.

There’s a feeling of disconnect when you experience something for the first time. When you see the first monster you’ll have to kill yourself, or when you see glowing eyes in the dark coming from another witcher and you can’t tell if it’s a friend or not, or when you jump off a cliff into the ocean and you don’t know what’s on the other side. Aiden had experienced all of these, with varying degrees of pain, and remembers the pit in his stomach as he’s about to go through into the unknown. He feels it now, looking at Lambert. He doesn’t think he could put it into words, which would be odd enough for him, nor is he sure he recognises the look on Lambert’s face. Lambert, good and steady and unafraid. Unapologetic and loud, brave and brash, who looks now like he just faced the whole of the Wild Hunt on his own. Lambert, whose shaky hands hold on to him like he’s the only tangible thing in the world.

There’s a feeling, and Lambert will never call it fear, but maybe it’s the closest witchers can get to it. It’s the feeling he had when he was told he needed to complete the Killer on his own before being considered a real witcher at last. It’s the feeling he had the night before he left the keep with two swords strapped to his back for the first time. It’s the feeling he had when he had to fight an archgriffin with an arm already broken and his armour half destroyed. It’s the feeling he’s experiencing now, looking at Aiden as if he’s never seen him before. It’s the same look on Aiden’s face, whose hand still rests on his neck and feels like the only thing that’s ever been real since he was a child.

He watches, with baited breath, as Aiden opens his mouth, once, twice, thrice, and closes it again. He watches as Aiden’s throat works around soundless words that can’t seem to make it out. In his own head, Lambert hears the echoes of childish laughter, of motherly amusement, of the golden hue of love and happiness that surrounds it. In his head, he hears the echoes of laughter after a successful hunt, of Aiden humming into his hair as they lie together under the stars, the soft hums of contentment when they’ve had enough wine to make them loose and soft. He is struggling to make that connection through the haze in his mind and he needs Aiden to take the first step, or he won’t know how to follow.

Aiden, who has jumped from a cliff into siren swarmed waters more than once, is standing on that cliff and hesitating for the first time. If he jumps, there are sirens, and hidden rocks, and undercurrents. If he jumps, he might not make it back out. If he jumps, he can be weightless and know what flying feels like for a few blissful moments.

“I love you,” he whispers softly into the space between them, making the jump.

Lambert feels a hand in his, and a line stretches out, bright and clear, between old memories of happiness and this exact right moment. He lets himself be afraid for one moment, and then follows the thread all the way into Aiden.

“I love you too.”


End file.
